Marija Lysak, Elegant Microweb UK
Whether your company employs five or 500 staff, to succeed in business, every organisation has to cope with numerous challenges including rapid changes in technology, fluctuating customer behaviour and shrinking product lifecycles. To stay ahead of the competition, businesses must make well-informed, timely decisions and be in a position to interpret and manage company-wide information with complete confidence.
Many
companies have data sitting on various systems be it on Excel
spreadsheets, Access databases, or CRM (Customer Relationship
Management) systems but aren't in a position to use, view or analyse
the information cohesively. This is where a Business Intelligence
solution is required.
The term Business Intelligence (BI) was
coined in the late 1990's and referred to the emerging trend for
empowering the business user with the ability to extract and view
information from within their organisation in order to make informed
business decisions. BI combines knowledge and data from various sources
and presents it in report format or through what is known as the
‘dashboard'. Using the analogy of a car dashboard where all the
performance indicators are located in one place and easily viewed this
can be applied to a business dashboard which enables the user to see
the companies Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) instantly. These are
fully inter - active and a BI solution such as EJBI allows you to
determine your own access permissions be it at CEO, director, or senior
manager level or below. It also presents the information in high
impact, colourful, professional visual displays be it in the form of
pie charts, line charts and bar charts, as well as creating reports,
forecasts and schedules.
BI
query tools and software applications are now widely used by
organisations to understand trends in order to adjust business strategy
in order to make effective business decisions. Information regarding
customers, product sales, operational costs, Human Resources, staffing
and training expenditure and demographic data can be extracted from
other systems to give a unified view of the company's performance.
The
BI tools and applications in use today offer simple reporting and query
tools known as Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) functionality. This
enables a company to trend, monitor and forecast data to satisfy
operational and management information requirements. As data is
gathered over time these tools can be used by the business to develop
valuable baseline information, establish KPI's and monitor results and
make strategic course corrections.
The power of BI tools allows
business users to extract data and transform the data into a central
data store known as a cube. The cube has a ‘drill down' feature' which
allows the user to query information and view finer detail to determine
the actions required to meet their specific business needs. EJBI allows
you to colour code these features so best sellers or under performers
are easily identified.
You don't have to be an IT expert to
use a facility such as EJBI as it is very easy to use and it delivered
straight to your web browser. This also makes accessing the system
extremely simple and convenient as this can be done from virtually
anywhere provided you have access to the web, particularly helpful if
your management team are not all based at the same site or location.
A
BI system such as EJBI will soon give rapid return on investment as
monitoring your company performance becomes second nature and becomes
an invaluable facility for identifying trends and issues at anearly
stage saving you time and money.
For further information on how EJBI can help your business stay ahead of the competition please contact marija@elegantmicroweb.co.uk or telephone 01733 746478.
- Login or register to post comments
- Printer friendly version
Post Date: September 8th, 2010